Py-marytts

Following significant restructuring introduced in v5.0, this is a milestone release to stabilize numerous new features and fixes over the past two years.

New features

Apart from numerous fixed issues, there are several notable improvements in this version.

French language support

Thanks to Sathish Pammis work at ENST and UPMC in Paris, there is support for French TTS.
This supersedes an [earlier, experimental implementation](http://mary.opendfki.de/browser/branches/fr-branch), which relied on external, incompatible resources.

Moreover, thanks to the great work and generosity of the speakers, there are a number of French voices built from three open-source corpora:
- https://github.com/marytts/enst-camille-data
- https://github.com/marytts/upmc-jessica-data
- https://github.com/marytts/upmc-pierre-data

Improved Italian language support

Thanks to Fabio Tesser and Giulio Paci at ISTC in Padova, numerous improvements were made to Italian TTS.

This includes the resurrection of the HTK Labeler used for voicebuilding as an alternative to the EHMM Labeler, which may produce better results under certain conditions.

Documentation

Although much of the documentation has yet to be updated, the [MaryTTS website](http://mary.dfki.de/) itself is now built from within the MaryTTS source code.
This unifies the fossilized legacy content with new documentation, including the GitHub-hosted [wiki](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki), and makes it easy to manage.

Easier integration

Finally, thanks to global hosting at Bintray, it is now possible to integrate MaryTTS directly into other applications without the requirement to install it first locally, simply by adding the following repository block to your `pom.xml`:

xml
<repository>
<id>bintray</id>
<url>http://dl.bintray.com/marytts/marytts</url>
</repository>


Develepment news

There has been some fluctuation in the core development team since v5.0;
departures and other responsibilities have resulted in less activity than we would have liked.

Fortunately, we do finally have several new projects for MaryTTS, and several exciting features waiting the wings, ready to be rebased on a stable version (this one), including major overhauls of the voicebuilding toolchain and the new language support, and a new web-based installer.
Expect these to land in the near future.

MARY TTS 5.0 is the first release from the thoroughly restructured code base.

MARY TTS 5.0 is better supported by automated tests than any previous version of MARY TTS, but it may well be that in practical use some hiccups will appear that have not surfaced in testing.
Therefore cautious users are advised to treat this as a beta release.

New features

Simpler installation

Installing MARY TTS is now performed by simply unpacking the `zip` archive at the target location.
No clicking through installer pages anymore.
In particular, it is now trivial to install MARY TTS on a server without a GUI connection.

The component installer, `bin/marytts-component-installer.sh`, still uses a GUI;
see issue [43](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/issues/43) for a workaround.

Simplified use of MARY TTS in your own projects

It is now possible to use MARY TTS, with HMM-based voices at least, simply by placing the right files into the classpath.
For example, to use US English voice `cmu-slt-hsmm` in your own code, add the following jar files to your classpath:


marytts-server-5.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar
marytts-lang-en-5.0.jar
voice-cmu-slt-hsmm-5.0.jar


Instead of `marytts-server-5.0-jar-with-dependencies.jar` you can also include the individual dependencies, which can be automated using maven;
the source code on github includes examples for doing this in the `user-examples` folder.

New MaryInterface API

Using MARY TTS programmatically gets a lot simpler with MARY TTS 5.0 through the new MaryInterface API.
The same API can be used to access the TTS components running within the same java process or as a separate client-server setup.
For details, see [MaryInterface](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/MaryInterface).

Emotion Markup Language support

MARY TTS 5.0 includes an implementation of W3C's [Emotion Markup Language](http://www.w3.org/TR/emotionml/) as a means of requesting expressive synthetic speech.
The result of course depends on the expressive capabilities of the selected synthesis voice;
try out the EMOTIONML example with the German `dfki-pavoque-styles` voice on the [demo page](http://mary.dfki.de:59125/).

Modularized code base

The MARY TTS source code has been modularized for version 5.0.

The modular structure also makes it easier to see which components belong to a given language:
sub-projects such as `marytts-lang-de`, `marytts-lang-en` etc. contain all code and data that is language-specific.
The updated [New Language Support](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/New-Language-Support) documentation describes how to create a new language sub-project and integrate it into the system.

Distributed hosting of installable voices

The maintenance of the list of installable voices has been decentralized:
if you build a voice and wish to make it available to others, you can host it somewhere on the net, e.g. on Google Drive, Dropbox or similar.
For details, see [Publishing a MARY TTS Voice](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/Publishing-a-MARY-TTS-Voice).

New structures for improved code quality

MARY TTS 5.0 mostly results from the aim to establish sound software engineering practices in MARY TTS development.
Aspects of this include:
- the build environment was changed to maven, allowing us to write proper unit and integration tests for the code, and run them at every build;
- the code base was moved to github, allowing us to work as a distributed team, to develop features in whichever constellations arise, and to merge them into a stable master repository when ready;
- a Continuous Integration service, kindly provided by [BuildHive](https://buildhive.cloudbees.com/job/marytts/job/marytts/), automatically checks whether the code, and even the latest GitHub pull requests, build OK including all tests passing.

This is a minor release, whose main purpose it is to enable Italian TTS (see below).
It also includes small but useful improvements enabling the use of MARY TTS with screen readers on Linux (see below).

New language: Italian

Thanks to the great work by Fabio Tesser and co-workers at ISTC Padova, Italy, we can now make available support for Italian in MARY TTS.
To install the Italian voice, first download and install MARY TTS from the link above, then run the MARY Component installer, click "Update" to get the list of available languages and voices, and select the Italian Language and the istc-lucia-hsmm voice.

Improvements

Bill Cox has kindly provided a patch resulting in substantial reduction of time-to-audio for HMM-based voices.
The key idea is to use the vocoder in streaming mode rather than produce all audio before sending it onwards.
Since only the socket server, but not the http server, supports streaming audio, you need to use the socket server or a custom integration mechanism to benefit from this improvement.

Critically, however, this has improved the responsiveness of MARY TTS sufficiently to allow using MARY TTS with screen readers on Linux!

New voices

Bill also provided two male US English voices built from Arctic data sets, cmu-rms-hsmm and cmu-bdl-hsmm.
According to him, specifically the rms voice is quite intelligible at high speed (with the speedup done in a post-processing step currently).

Bugfixes

This release also includes a number of bugfixes, see http://mary.opendfki.de/query?status=closed&amp;group=resolution&amp;milestone=4.3.1 -- most notably, the problem with commas in label files during voice-building should now be fixed.